From the Sahara to the Square

By RYAN J. MEEHAN

Crimson Staff Writer



Walking down the staircase that leads to Eliot Street’s Twisted Village Record Shop, the first thing that commands the eye is a patchwork array of decals along the walls and ceiling. They bristle with dog-eared flyers, bumper stickers, and mascots from long-forgotten guerrilla marketing campaigns, in a kind of polychrome collage fit for a museum exhibit of ephemera. Like butterflies mounted behind glass, they’ve been taken out of their natural habitat, removed from the context of the streetlamps and mailboxes where they meant what they said, into a new habitat and context, where they mean something else. On these walls, they symbolize an intrinsic bond between the post-bohemian artistic anarchy of graffiti culture and the mercurial lunatic fringe that underground music has long occupied.

The basement room that comprises Twisted Village is dusty and poorly lit, but an anxious potential crackles through the atmosphere; it’s the same potential that can resonate in the remote stacks of a rare book room or in a long-ignored film archive. This is the potential of new information, of a new breed of art. Much of the catalog in Twisted Village is composed of records, CDs, even cassettes that the casual music listener will never, ever hear—music that waits, coiled spring-like, to be explored. Casual observers will point to an apparent tautological problem with the type of music and type of patron that is to be found in a place like Twisted Village: worthwhile music has already found a listening audience, and the unexplored is ignored for good reason. The more adventurous of us know better, and one of the best examples of deep-underground musical phenomena to be found at the Village is a small specialty label called Sublime Frequencies.

The Sublime Frequencies imprint is, in itself, a kind of anomaly. The label is best known for its affiliation with Alan Bishop—one of the three musicians that composed the legendary outsider trio Sun City Girls—who founded the label along with Hisham Mayet. The Sun City Girls, composed of Bishop and his brother Richard along with the late Charles Gocher, gained a considerable cult following with their prolific, eclectic output that runs the gamut from folk revival and psychedelic to noise, drone, and experimental world music. While Sublime Frequencies never released an SCG album, the parallels between the band’s evolution and the stylistic samplings of the label are abundant.

The label’s mission and appeal can be described with a story about one of their finest releases, “Guitar Music from the Western Sahara,” by Group Doueh. According to documents about the album, Bishop heard a sample of the band’s innovative guitar arrangements on Moroccan radio. Leads from cassette dealers identified the music as Sahwari from the Western Sahara and Mayet eventually journeyed to Daklha, the Western Sahara’s last settlement, where he tracked down and recorded the music of Baamar Salmou. Doueh, as Salmou is known, had apparently refused recording contracts with major labels in Africa and Europe. The result of those recordings is nothing short of remarkable. Each song reverberates with a deeply rooted local color and ethnic identity, with a language and tone that sharply separate the music from anything being made in the West. But there is also the undeniable presence of late-60s British blues and the more psychedelic work of Hendrix.

For those used to high-quality recording, production value, and lyrical and musical transparency, this record may initially be alienating. The reward, however, only increases with every listen.

For many Americans, Africa is still the Dark Continent in many ways; news networks tell us of famine, poverty, disease, and genocide, but rare is the occasion to hear the fruits of cultural cross-pollination emanating from such a truly obscure region. Perhaps it’s fitting then that this music that has traveled so far in obscurity should remain in relative obscurity in America, but for a few lucky souls the promise of these new sounds is too much to resist.

It would be dismissive to call Sublime Frequencies a label solely interested in “world music,” a term that has become marginalized and even slightly pejorative in the ears of mainstream music fans. The releases of Sublime Frequencies emphasize not only the nuanced differences, but also the similarities between seemingly disparate cultures. While releases like “Radio Palestine”—samples of Palestinian radio stations spliced into one another— and “Streets of Lhasa,”—field recordings of Westerners exploring Tibet in search of musicians—may capture the imaginations of many. The experience of listening to these recordings is unlike any other. While chaotic, grating, and even annoying at times, the recordings of the Sublime Frequencies label not only bring awareness and enjoyment of otherwise essentially overlooked cultures, but does well to remove, in a small way, that culture from the context of contemporary history. And like those decals on the walls at Twisted Village, there is a beauty and a fascination with art that, ripped from its context, has taken on newer, more symbolic beauty.